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The importance of getting value marketing selling right alinean messaging tools training
Alinean, Inc., a privately held company developing "economic justification tools" for business-to-business (B2B) vendors, was founded in September 2001 in Orlando, Florida by ex-Gartner managing vice president Tom Pisello. Alinean, Inc. develops sales and marketing software as a service (SaaS) and consulting services designed to evolve typical product centric pitches into more value-focused tools. The company offers services to analyze and justify different technology products and business services using ROI / TCO analysis, including servers, storage, systems management, telecommunications, operating systems, eCRM, wireless, security, database management, e-business procurement, ERP, supply chain management, outsourcing, business intelligence, mobility, collaborative commerce, HR, manufacturing, transportation and logistics, supply chain management, content and document management, asset management, and office automation. Its stuff include Alinean Interactive White Papers, a demand generation tool for B2B marketers. Alinean advertises several different services and solutions including value message and insight development, value storytelling, including content marketing optimization, sales and marketing assessment, ROI and TCO tools
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Growth
In 2002, Alinean released ValueIT, a set of IT budgeting tools for CIOs. The system was designed to calculate return on investment of proposed IT spending and benchmark it against a database of 4,000 U.S. Companies across 400 industry segments. Early in 2003 Alinean attracted the attention of venture capital firms including Stonehenge and Grace Venture Partners. As a result, Alinean secured funding to increase product development and help them expand to new markets. Stephen A. Bennett, director of Stonehenge at the time said, “As IT spending accelerates within today’s more demanding corporate environment, the need for highly credible ROI solutions will become a necessity for all IT vendors.” In 2004, International Data Corporation (IDC) announced a comprehensive selling program, ExpertROI, designed to validate the economic value of technology and business investments. The ROI tools used for the program were developed in partnership with Alinean. Between 2004 and 2010 Alinean continued to increase its list of clients to include organizations like HP, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, Juniper Networks, EMC and OfficeMax. In order to address the continually growing list of customer, Alinean increased its team by 20% in 2010. From 2007 to 2010 the company experienced 20-30% growth. In 2010 Alinean was ranked number 2942 in the top companies from www.inc.com. The site reported a three-year growth of 73 percent. In 2010 Alinean received several awards. Grow FL awarded Alinean a Florida Company to Watch recognition. Inc.5000 identified Alinean as one of the fastest growing companies. SiriusDecisions identified Alinean as an emerging technology leader.
Primary Platform
Alinean uses its proprietary Alinean XcelLive platform, re-launched in 2010 to develop and deliver their tools via the Cloud. The platform is promoted as “the first software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Platform used to create and deliver Interactive Smart Content, Web-based Demand Gen and Sales Tools with no application programing.” Basically, the platform helps standardize and centralize value-focused demand generation and sales enablement tools, but through a cloud based platform which is proposed to reduce needs for development.
Content Marketing Assessment Tool
April, 2011 Alinean announced a cooperative effort with the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), a business to business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) consulting group, to deliver a brief assessment of customer’s current B2B content marketing efficiency and effectiveness. The tool, The Content Marketing Assessment Tool, is offered free to the public and is based on research performed over 1,100 North American B2B marketers.
Fight Frugalnomics
On June 14, 2011 Alinean launched a campaign called Fight Frugalnomics. Frugalnomics, a neologism, is an extremely frugal approach to technology and B2B purchase decisions in business as a result of difficult economic times. Frugalnomics describes the impact of the bursting of the tech bubble and ultimately the impact of the Great Recession on buyer sentiment - resulting in a more skeptical and frugal buyer, and driving the need for sales and marketing to help cost justify planned purchases. Fight Frugalnomics is a campaign designed to provide B2B sales and marketing with successful strategies and tools to combat the frugal mindset of organizations.
Business Influence
In 2005, Chairman and Founder of Alinean Tom Pisello began writing a blog which is “dedicated to the strategies and tools used by solution providers to better prove and improve the value of B2B solutions to frugal buyers – using value messaging, storytelling, insights, financial justification, ROI calculators and TCO comparisons.” The blog provides Pisello a forum in which he can promote his ideas and share best practices around B2B value selling and marketing.
ValueStory
In 2013 Alinean launched ValueStory, a new platform to help B2B sales and marketing better communicate and quantify the value of their solutions and services to frugal buyers. The tool was originally launched as an iPad App, with a coming HTML Web application version. Soon after release, the ValueStory App was made available for free download and included a collection of free ROI calculators for sales, marketing and IT.